Blue Angel 69 takes the concept of MaxIt,
but makes a few changes. Negative numbers are displayed without a
minus sign, instead, the color of the tile the number is on reveals
whether it will be added or substracted to your score. There are no
more zeros. And as the tiles are removed during gameplay, they
reveal a picture, one of Hajime Sorayama's sexy robots, or at least
something very similar. Unlike the graphics of
Sexy Droids, which are direct scans of
Sorayama's work, these seem to be just inspired
.
But these pictures should not be seen as the main feature of the game. MaxIt is a very solid and entertaining game concept, and Blue Angel 69 is a good implementation of this concept.
It seems that Blue Angel 69 was more popular on the
Commodore 64 then on any other platform.
Necessarily the graphics of this version were rather different,
especially the blue theme had to be dropped. You can see all the
angels
, on
Girls of '64.
Whether or not there was an (official) DOS version, too, remained
a mystery very long. In 2004, I came across Joseph Seymour's 1995 list
of Games on the Internet and another list of DOS Games on the web
(last revised 1996) that both listed an angel.zip (142kB) on a
by then already defunct FTP archive under the name Blue Angel '69
.
This first gave me the idea that there might be an MS-DOS version of
Blue Angel 69, as it would turn out, a correct assumption for the
wrong reason.
One and a half years later, I discovered Uros Sajko's remake. It is a Windows game, but he originally wrote it for Unix and DOS, and he uses an apostrophe in the title, while Magic Bytes did not. So I (probably correctly) concluded that this mysterious angel.zip was actually Uros Sajko's original game, and (incorrectly) that an MS-DOS version of the original game did not exist.
But then I found a German site that gave credits for an IBM PC (DOS) version: Manfred Matschke and Gabriele Biallas, as well as a year (1990). I found a forum of someone who claimed to have it. Well, in September 2008 the mystery was finally solved. The DOS version exists, and here's a screenshot:
It is quite interesting how they handled the graphics here. The game runs in hi-res EGA mode, but the graphics were not actually redrawn, just stretched to fit the higher resolution. The goal was just to get the full EGA palette. The same technique, for the same reason, was used in Ooze: Creepy Nites. A side effect is that this is the only version of Blue Angel 69 where the squares are really square.
Blue Angel 69 can run under CGA as well, using the monochrome high resolution:
Technically, Blue Angel is very unproblematic. I played it first in DOSBox, then I tried it directly on my main XP box. While the animations (the blinking eye and the cursor) run far too fast, this does not impair playability in the least. Unlike Sexy Droids, the PC version of Blue Angel 69 has no sound to begin with, so this is not a problem either.
As for the release year, I stuck to 1989 for the DOS version as well. You will notice that the two files that have valid time stamps are from November of that year, the time stamps of the other files are corrupted. It would make sense that it was released in time for Christmas.
Three years later Blue Angel 69 was remade as Sexy Droids for Amiga and PC only. The two games are mostly identical, only the graphics are different. Sexy Droids was licensed by Penthouse and released as Penthouse Hot Numbers featuring models of this magazine. There are a few more implementations of MaxIt, but not many.
The concept of rewarding the player of a puzzle game with some sort of erotic picture for each completed level, on the other hand, is widespread. Examples are Porntris, Uncover It, and X Rock. Of course, it is the heart and soul of all strip poker games. Of these, Teenage Queen has a somewhat similar atmosphere.